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Do ‘Contextualist Cases’ Support Contextualism?

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Abstract

This paper addresses the argument from ‘contextualist cases’—such as for instance DeRose’s Bank cases—to attributor contextualism. It is argued that these cases do not make a decisive case against invariantism and that the debate between contextualists and invariantists will have to be settled on broader theoretical grounds.

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Notes

  1. K-LOW and K-HIGH are in essence Cohen’s (1999) Airport case. DeRose (1992, 2009) has used a different pair of cases, his Bank cases, for the same purpose. Notice that my versions of the cases feature attributions of knowledge whether P. This should be harmless, however, for two reasons: first, knowledge whether P is very plausibly constituted either by knowledge that P (in case P is true) or by knowledge that not-P (in case not-P is true). As a result, if CI fails for attributions of knowledge whether P, there is every reason to think that it must also fail for attributions of knowledge that P. Second, the cases could, given a generous investment of space, be converted into cases of knowledge-that attributions. For a recipe how to do this see DeRose (2009: 62–63).

  2. Note that this is the reason why, before advancing to the second of each pair of cases, I asked you to (try to) forget my description of the first one.

References

  • Cohen, S. (1999). Contextualism, skepticism, and the structure of reasons. In J. Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives (Vol. 13). Oxford: Blackwell.

  • DeRose, K. (1992). Contextualism and knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 912–929.

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  • DeRose, K. (2009). The case for contextualism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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  • Rysiew, P. (2009). Epistemic contextualism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. (Spring 2009 edn).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Michael Blome-Tillmann, Mikkel Gerken, Blake Roeber and the audience of the 2008 Joint Session for helpful comments on various earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to the referees of Erkenntnis for their patience with and relentless efforts to improve this piece. This work was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship with Research Foundation—Flanders.

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Correspondence to Christoph Kelp.

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Kelp, C. Do ‘Contextualist Cases’ Support Contextualism?. Erkenn 76, 115–120 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9330-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9330-y

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